Get the Key to Keywords

02/01/2018Stacy Wells

The Key to Keywords

Traditional keywords are so out. In fact, Mike Templeman from Foxtail Marketing says that

Keywords are a bit antiquated.

Why?

In the webinarthat Mike presented with Convirza, he explains that keywords really lost a lot of their efficacy as a signal about five years ago. People started to search in more semantic terms as opposed to short bullion terms. These new searches sound much more like everyday speech. Keywords got much longer, and look more like phrases.

These long-tail keywords can often take the form of a question. They may also show more specific consumer intent from the outset.

Despite their shorter history, these long-tail keywords are full of value. You need to change the way you think about keywords by adding these long-tail keywords to your SEO repertoire.

The Key to Keywords — Rethink SEO

Another key to keywords in today’s world is forgetting those high volume keywords. Sound crazy? Well, it’s not.

You can chase those high volume keywords, but you’re chasing them with a crowd of companies. Alternatively, you can choose lower volume keywords that show a high buying intent for a specific product you have.

This works especially well if you’ve got something unique to your company, like a product or service that is less ubiquitous in the commercial world. Your unique offer will help you to be discovered from keyword searches; it is not the only thing that you will sell.

It might seem to go against everything you ever thought you knew about SEO, but here’s why it’s a more productive way to think about keywords.

First, it saves you time. These keywords might actually be the keywords that you’re ranking high for, so you don’t have to spend months and months chasing that first page on the search results list and possibly never even making it.

Secondly, if you’re ranking higher on the organic search results page than you will naturally experience more traffic, which will ultimately produce a higher conversion rate. That’s not going to happen if you don’t stay on page one of Google.

Finally, these unique, long-tail keywords are likely to have a high buying intent. These longer keywords that actually bring people to your page can quickly identify the searcher as part of your target audience. If they are searching to solve a unique problem and you can clearly show that your company is the answer, you’ll be very likely to start a conversation with a new client.

Overall, this strategy means that these lower volume keywords might just be your highest ROI. How sweet is that?

It might feel counter-intuitive, but if you focus on and optimize for the keywords that bring traffic to your site and convert, then you’ll be focusing on the keywords that are in reality your most valuable, no matter how high the volume.

Trust us, throw that marketing budget and energy into optimizing for these high-value keywords and you’ll see crazy fast SEO results.